Category Archives: Trading

This is meant to be a moderate guide for anyone looking to try and make some money station trading in Eve. I will not go into arbitrage, which is buying in one region and hauling to another, nor is this about industry. The main focus is making money in stations. Station trading is the act of placing buy orders above the competition, then selling the goods from those buy orders as sell orders. The profit is the margin between your (high) buy price and your subsequent (low) sell price. Time Required I am a graduate student. This means I have the luxury of being able to carry a laptop with me all day and periodically (every few hours) log in and check my orders on the market. At minimum you want to check your orders in the morning, once or twice during the day, and in the evening. I personally like to check my orders one last time before bed, as that lets you get below or above other US TZ players that may have already turned in for the day. This obviously changes based on your TZ. The more you can update, the more successful you will be. Updating Continue Reading →

Final Results: THE END! And a record setting day! And this gem happened today: Lesson: Pay attention to your buy orders when you type them in. This guy put an extra “1” in the hundreds digit, and I made about 70 mil off his mistake. Woo! Recap 30 days ago I gave a fresh alt 5 million isk and just the basic trade skills. Then I almost exclusively traded in stations, setting buy orders and flipping those to sell orders. I started in Jita, moved to Amarr and then to Dodixie, and ended up back in Jita. 5 mil was turned into 1,461 million, or a 29,236% increase is value. Here is the overall chart of the daily reports: You can see the dips when I moved, as I cleared out stock before moving on. My final Trade skills are: Accounting 4 Broker Relations 4 Marketing 4 Procurement 4 Retail 4 Trade 4 I didn’t even use all of those skills. Hypothesis: You can pay for a PLEX with a new character just by station trading. Results: True. Addendum The full guide will be coming with lots more info. I expect to have it done sometime over the weekend. As Continue Reading →

Results: I had my last final today, so not much happened. Tomorrow is wide open though, so I am hoping for a strong finish! Aside from my busy day, not much to report. Mostly trading in weapons and various mid slot modules lately. I did nothing special, just flipped a lot of orders while on campus. The final write up / guide is also underway. Expect that in the next few days.

Results: PLEX was purchased and redeemed today, so I am adding this cost in to the total to keep the numbers making sense. A 485 mil loss would seem a bit substantial, no? Aside from that, new record day with 172 mil in profits! My return to Jita appears to have been a good idea. This goes back to the point of turnover. Margins in Jita are not as good as many other trade hubs but the goods move! I only had about half of my usual order slots going as I ramped up in Jita again, and I still crushed it compared to Amarr or Dodixie. Being able to choose from all the weapon types is a huge boon. At this point I don’t really care if my margins increase in actual dollar amounts. If I can maintain roughly 100 mil margin a day I can easily PLEX two of my three accounts and still be building wealth. If I can keep up the 150 m mark, then I will never even have to use profits from other account to pay for the game and fund ships. I also just got a job! So for the summer at least, Continue Reading →

Results: So I moved again, woo. Back to Jita. I was in Dodixie for long enough to realize that it is hot mess at the moment. Although you cannot prove bots exist, I’ll be damned if they haven’t infested that joint. I sat for about fifteen minutes updating orders, and a slew of odd updates would come every single time after I updated. Some would be for the exact same price, .01 isk above or below me depending. If I have to deal with that, at least I can do it where more people are buying and selling stuff. So, back to Jita. It’s rather frustrating moving tens of millions of isk back and forth and having very little to show for it. The nice part is that my liquid isk is up to 855 mil. Not bad, not too much locked into inventory. I will need to buy PLEX (in game) in the next day or two. I’ll likely add that to the running total to indicate the monthly total, in the spirit of this challenge. I will take this moment to say this: I’ve proved the hypothesis of Beamer Grey and myself. You can make enough isk station Continue Reading →

Results: Nothing like a good day to wipe clean the previous three. 86 mil to go to hit the revised goal. Not a whole lot to say, except meta modules are still where it’s at. In an case of synchronicity, Ripard Teg was talking about my experience in the previous market challenge post here. I thought it was a nice explanation that I failed to realize.

Results: Bit of a slow weekend for a few reasons. First, I was not that motivated. Second I was amazingly busy with wedding planning and an arm injury. Third, Amarr got the best of me and I decided to move on to another hub. This lead to selling off stock at lower than expected prices in order to not be hauling anything besides skillbooks when I left. Interestingly, it seems that a few weeks after I get into an hub, other traders come join the party and margins go way down, .01 isk wars go way up, and I find it better to move to another spot. I am wondering if others have noticed this in the day trading scene? It makes sense that people follow the money, and I am starting to think a huge part of this is anticipating the changes and staying ahead of that curve. I don’t have the isk to do full blown manipulation, but I wonder how many people are out there that can and do crash margins for a few days to get rid of people like me. Another thought: Weekends suck for market trading. All the weekend warriors come out, run missions, Continue Reading →

Results: Rollin’ along. Trading on the margins. I need to move some inventory at this point, my balance is getting a bit heavy in non-liquid assets. I have a breather from non-Eve obligations tomorrow, so I’ll be working on that a bit. Development of additional alts will also likely be on the docket, or at least seeding them. My posts this week have been a bit shorter due to: Finals. I’m in school and those take a fair bit of work. P90X workouts. Roc would be so proud. I’m working on my meat-space capsule and damn if those don’t kick you in the arse. Once you get the hang of buying high and selling low, most of the work becomes updating orders and browsing the market for trends and deals. There is not much technique, just a lot of reading the charts and graphs. Also, my goal is revised. I want to clear 1 billion isk and have enough to keep rolling by cashing in for two PLEXes. As Hulkageddon is going strong, I am not bringing as much income in on my miner account.

Results: Banner day! New record for margin, at 108m. That was nice. One cool thing about have more liquid isk is the ability to go in a buy up orders that are trying to push down the overall margin. You sacrifice some margin on a few items to keep your margin on the bulk of your goods. This gets you more isk. Win. Based on my success so far, and my lack of desire to spend any more time updating the same orders, I have begun training additional trade alts. The more observant readers of my blog may have noted that I currently run three accounts, roughly defined as Combat, Industrialist, and Trader/Corp/Blarg. This means I have 9 slots, and three can be up and running at any given time. The obvious next step to enhance profits is to have eyes, and orders, stationed in or near every trade hub so I can capitalize on arbitrage. For those who are unfamiliar, trading has a few flavors. Station trading is what I have been mainly involved in up till now. This consists of setting high buy orders and selling to low sell orders in the same station. But this approach is Continue Reading →